Salt Hill 29

Salt Hill 29—our spring 2012 issue and one of our largest to date—is evidence of how capricious and flimsy our perceived reality is, how gray and clouded the separation between phenomenological existence and the science fictions looming behind it. Or in front of it. The fantasies stuck between its dark matter. Either which way, the work in this issue pursues the out-there dimensions. Stories from J. Robert Lennon, Katie Jean Shinkle, Carlos Franz, Chiara Barzini, Jacob White, Renee Gladman, and Ulrich Haarbürste alienate the familiar and normalize the bizarre. Poetry by Jeff Alessandrelli, Christy Crutchfield, Patrick Lawler, Pablo Medina, Emily Pettit, and G. C. Waldrep accesses matrices of language to come alive with insights into outer and inner worlds. UFO landings, LCD pillowcases, 3D Darwinism, and Cartesian-screen videogames are on view in artwork by Faye Moorhouse, Rudy Rucker, Paul Slocum, and Aaron $hunga. Rivka Galchen talks 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ben Marcus pines for Heidi Julavits-decoded PowerPoints. Here in the Golden Snowball capital of Earth, the winter of the Mayan apocalypse has been mild to an eerie degree; we’ve been transported to a fine-weathered parallel realm, an unseasonably utopic Syracuse. Come along for the ride: “Enter Xenocave!”